Bribes and Kickbacks
To bribe someone is to pay the person to violate his or her official duties; that is, to perform an action that is inconsistent with the person’s work contract or job responsibilities or with the nature of the work the person has been hired to do, Although usually financial, the payment can be anything that is of value to the recipient. Offering a bribe is wrong because it is an inducement to act dishonestly, to disregard one’s duties, or to betray a trust-for example, tendering cash to a building inspector to ignore a code violation. For the same reasons, it is wrong to accept a bribe even if one happens to end up not doing what one was bribed to do.
A typical case of bribery was that of Norman Rothberg, an accountant working at ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning Company in the Los Angeles area. When he learned that ZZZZ Best had falsified accounts on insurance restoration jobs, he passed on the information to the accounting firm of Ernst & Whinney, which was overseeing ZZZZ Best’s planned multimillion-dollar acquisition of another carpet-cleaning chain. When an investigation began, Rothberg accepted $17,000 from ZZZZ Best officials to back off from his initial reports. Rothberg’s conduct was wrong because he accepted money in exchange for violating his responsibilities as an accountant. By contrast, a server who accepts a gratuity for providing good service to a restaurant customer is not accepting a bribe, for she is not violating her duties. However, situation would be different if she took money in exchange for not charging the customer for drinks he ordered. Of course, bribery can occur in more subtle forms than in the Rothberg case-for example, a contractor who charges a company executive only a nominal fee for building her a home patio on the tacit understanding that the executive will see that her company accepts the contractor’s bid for an important project.
Bribery sometimes takes the form of a kickback, which is a percentage payment to a person able to influence or control a source of income. Thus, Alicia Rocha, sales representative for Sisyphus Books, offers a textbook-selection committee member a percentage of the handsome commission she stands to make if a Sisyphus civics text is adopted. The money the committee member receives for the preferred consideration is a kickback. A flagrant case of kickbacks involved American executives of the Honda Motor Company. For years they pocketed millions in bribes and kickbacks from local car dealers; in return, the dealers received permission to open lucrative dealerships and had no trouble obtaining models (such as the Acura) that were in scarce supply and could be sold at a large profit.